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Liu, Alan

Professor

Education:

B.A., English Literature, summa cum laude, Yale University,

M.A., Creative Writing, Stanford University, 1979

Ph.D., English Literature, Stanford University, 1980

Alan Liu is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member of UCSB's Media Arts & Technology graduate program. Previously, he was on the faculty of Yale University's English Department and British Studies Program.

Liu is currently working on books about where the sense of history has gone in the information age and how the digital humanities field can develop a mode of "critical infrastructure studies."

He served as Chair of his department during 2008-12. In 2012-13 he received an ACLS fellowship as well as short-term fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Australian National University Humanities Research Centre. In fall 2015 he was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Research Interests:

Recent News:

Alan is currently finishing work with a team of others on the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) project and co-leading the 4Humanities advocacy initiative as well as the UCSB 4Humanities local chapter called 4Humanities@UCSB (an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Research Focus Group.

Research Excerpt:

"I am interested in the cultural life of information or, more broadly, of contemporary knowledge work. My specific question concerns the role of literature in that cultural life. What is the future of literature when all culture is increasingly the culture of information and when even literary scholars subordinate literature to an apparent clone of information: cultural context?"

"The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning,"The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005): 149-57 [reprint of "The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning," Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 553-62]

The Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB(Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara, Bookstore, 1994). (124 pg. guide to basic Unix, e-mail, ftp, telnet, usenet, gopher, World Wide Web, etc., used as text for my courses about or utilizing the Internet; also made available through publication by the campus bookstore to general UCSB humanities community)

"The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing,"Michigan Quaterly Review (forthcoming)

Projects (Initiatives, Grants, etc.):

Principal Investigator, 2005-2010: Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading <http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu> (University of California Multicampus Research Group, 2005-2010). Interdisciplinary project designed to study and develop innovations in the practices of online reading. Current special focus: "social computing" as a bridge between scholarly and public online reading environments. Funded initially by a $175,000 University of California Office of the President grant (plus $259,000 of University of California, Santa Barbara, cost sharing), the project includes among its participants 24 University of California faculty representing at least 11 different disciplines from 7 of the University of California general campuses.

Co-Founder, 2007-present: UCSB Social Computing Group <http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/> Co-founder (with Kevin Almeroth, Bruce Bimber, Jennifer Earl, Andrew Flanagin, James Frew, Miriam Metzger) of the UCSB Social Computing Group. Affiliated with the Transliteracies Project, the UCSB Center for Information and Technology (CITS), and the UCSB Credibility and Digital Media project, the Social Computing Group works on the new field of "social computing" that has emerged as a result of the increasing impact of social processes in the online documents of "Web 2.0." Particular topics of study include: social computing technologies, analytical and data-mining methods, information credibility (new socio-technological mechanisms of authority, quality, and trust), and collective action. The Social Computing Group organized a research workshop on May 30, 2008, involving extramural scholars, industry specialists, and others in the field. It is also writing grant proposals (including a NSF IGERT proposal) to start a graduate research and training program at UCSB on social computing.

Principal Investigator, 1998-2007: Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information <http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu>. NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project in the University of California, Santa Barbara, English Department started in 1998. The project, which involves multiple faculty and graduate students, creates curricular and research materials related to: 1. the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that now make "information" so powerful, and 2. the equivalent contexts that have always made literature itself an "information technology," including the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, etc. Transcriptions also includes an undergraduate "specialization" or curricular track for English majors. [Note: Transcriptions was renamed the Literature.Culture.Media Center in 2007]

General Editor, 2005-present: The Agrippa Files. <http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu> Web archive (co-created with graduate students) of unique materials related to the origins and composition of the limited-edition art book titled Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, with self-encrypting (erasing) poem by William Gibson and etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh (New York: Kevin Begos, 1992). Since its original publication, this rare work has become famous primarily for unauthorized copies of the poem by William Gibson on the Internet. With the cooperation of the publisher, Kevin Begos, The Agrippa Files makes available photos of the physical art book, the code and an emulation of the original self-encrypting Gibson poem, correspondence and contracts related to the work's publication, a narrative of the origin and development of the work, and resources for critical study.

Editor, 1994-present:The Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research <http://vos.ucsb.edu> Initiated in 1994 as a 70+ Web-page directory of online humanities research resources organized by field, historical period, author, etc. Reimplemented as database-driven site in 2001 with the assistance of Robert Adlington and Jeremy Douglass.

Selected Lectures:

"Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0." The Big Picture lecture series. Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. 13 July 2009.

"Strange Bookshelves." Panel on "Humanities and Technology: The Past Ten Years, The Next Ten Years." HumaniTech. University of California, Irvine. 19 May 2009. [Invited talk]

"The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing." Conference on "Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age." University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 15 May 2009. [Invited talk]